Rolando Santamaría, an amazing engineer and personal friend

9 min readApr 9, 2020

Today I am going to explain the 10 different reasons why and how Rolando Santamaria Maso (my personal friend) has gone so far in his career. Additionally, sometimes I also get his support in his extra time with very important challenging architectural discussions at Codegenio.

1- Modest childhood

Rolando Santamaría Masó was born in the year 1986 in the bosom of a humble family in the neighborhood of Calimete, Cuba. From his parents he learned to be honest, educated, and studious, standing out from an early age for being a good student and having satisfactory results.

2- Loved software since he was 11 years old

Rolando discovered his first computer when he was 11 years old at his dad’s job. From that moment he realized that the field of computers and technology was going to be his future career.

3- I was lucky to sit near Rolando at the university

I met Rolando in 2007 when I joined the same University of Computer Sciences in Cuba where he was studying. At first, I belonged to another group, however, I was lucky enough to move to Rolando’s group and there I ended up, sitting right next to him for the next 5 years.

The University made us inseparable friends, personally and technologically. I have to admit that I trained for years to be able to type as fast as Rolando with the computer. We participated together in games, software competitions, and parties, and trust me, dancing was not our best talent 🤣 🤣 🤣

Rolando’s software expertise was unbeatable, I always said to myself. How comes he is so smart? The answer was easy, he was driven by love, and passion for computers, about making things just work by failing and failing until he was successful, that’s how we all learn.

The class Rolando loved the best was Programming, I remember our Teacher Joana, who would say, can someone please do this recursive algorithm in 3 lines of code? Then I remember I used to do it in maybe 4, but Rolando was doing it in just 1 line. I wish you have seen the teacher’s face trying to understand Rolando’s algorithm. I usually ended up copying Rolando’s algorithm and moving forward, he was definitely my idol, my biggest inspiration source, I always wanted to be like him.

4- Innate Talent

Within just weeks of sitting beside him I figured out that Rolando’s talent was unique, he was able to come up with complete software solutions in a matter of hours. And there I was again, trying to learn from the best of the best at my school. Even if he does not admit it still today, he was just born super smart.

I remember how he used to study Mathematics a day before the test achieving the best results in Calculation 1, (integrals and derivatives were a piece of cake for him), Physics, and many other topics were super easy for him.

5- Participated in active Software Projects since the first year of the University

The Computer Science University (UCI) prepared a small team of students to be linked to real productive projects that would solve problems within the university. Our project was called Informatization. We belonged to a very small faculty of UCI, with about 500 students in total. However, only 30 were lucky enough to participate in this Informatization project where we were tasked with very difficult projects that we had to achieve in a record time.

Some of the projects we implemented in the university were intended to optimize, and perfection already existing processes at the university level. While I focused mostly on the Frontend technologies, Rolando could take care of the server side and the database himself.

Rolando was good with PHP, so good that he created a PHP framework from scratch, he called it A++, and literally based on this framework he created many many applications that ran perfectly.

For example, on February 14th, 2009, he came up with a really interesting Web Application “Buzón del Amor” I am glad to share a screenshot of it with you! As you can see below, it was software intended to send messages privately encrypted to the person you loved in the university. Every user was assigned a unique identifier (UUID) that was then decrypted and converted to an email address internally, but the fun part is that the person who received the email could reply but didn’t really know who was sending it 💖 . Of course, some of my friends made a lot of fun out of this app, you can’t even imagine!

6- Winner of many software competitions

Great, with Rolando strong on the server side, he just needed someone with good Photoshop/Gimp skills to help him quickly put to work his Backend skills, that was me 🤭

We soon participated in the development of many software applications from the university. Some of them we just were part of, see below some examples:

Some of the applications that Rolando Santamaría was part of implementing the Backend, Database, and Software Architect back in 2009

Rolando also had a lot of good positive results participating in Software competitions at the University level, getting always second or third place and sometimes even first. The knowledge combined with his personality made him a great personality, but also a great leader and example to follow by many others at the University.

jWebSocket Framework defined an unforgettable experience in our lives

Back in 2010 we left PHP aside and moved to Java Development as our main programming language at the university. Rolando of course learned it in a matter of weeks and started working in an open-source framework called jWebSocket. We quickly became part of this amazing WebSockets framework discovering real-time web communication. Our experience here was huge because we had a strong background in Web Programming, so, we kept doing JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, but this time the server was not PHP anymore, but Java. Rolando was soon one of the core developers of jWebSocket framework and I was together with him implementing demos, improving the technology, making video tutorials, etc.

Rolando’s contribution to this technology was ensuring that the TCP, Tomcat, Grizzly engine's low-level communication would accept as many connections as possible, multi-threading, and many other amazing features supporting the owner of the technology Alexander Schulze from Innotrade GmbH.

Although jWebSocket Technology, unfortunately, does not exist anymore, the Team still exists and some of them like Rolando are luckily today part of Codegenio’s core dev Team. Also, all the experience that we all got with it remains, as well as small videos on Youtube we will never forget still prove how powerful this technology was.

7- Best Software Engineer graduated in the faculty of our University

Because of his great performance, so many won competitions at the university level, his participation in all events, his good development during his 5 years, and his stunning Engineering Final Thesis, Rolando was chosen as the best student who graduated in the faculty of our university. He graduated in July 2012 as Gold Title Informatic Sciences Engineer in Cuba.

8- Open source contributor

Since then, Rolando has participated in international conferences and has been part of a lot of different enterprises increasing his knowledge base and growing professionally, being able to put into practice all the knowledge he got in the university.

Rolando has been part of the open source community by participating first in the jWebSocket framework open source community as one of the core developers and contributors.
Recently Rolando released fast-gateway https://www.npmjs.com/package/fast-gateway, a super fast, framework-agnostic Node.js API Gateway for the masses ❤️

See some of Rolando’s articles in Medium:

9- Tech Leader expertise

With a stunning CV, Rolando is today part of the world’s first free-floating car-sharing service. The ShareNow company! As a tech lead, he has gained experience in many fields, including programming languages, Software Architecture, Leading a Team of Engineers, interviewing talents in the area, and many other skills.

So, if you like this article, please share/leave your comments, and spread the love!

10- Work colleague's reviews

Of course, I am not the only one that talks well about Rolando, the reviews on LinkedIn speak for themselves.

Rolando has a calmness to him, even when things get chaotic in big complex engineering projects. It was a great pleasure to work with him on truly futuristic projects within the autonomous driving space. Great tech lead. I hope our paths will cross again!
Søren Halskov Nissen (Advisor at Simple Feast)
I had the privilege of working with Rolando for over one year on a very challenging project. I will only mention a few things about Rolando which made our collaboration very enjoyable and productive: — First, his excellent technical skills and deep knowledge of the field — I’ve learned a lot about nodejs and backend engineering from him. But these skills were always exhibited in a humble and calm manner. Rolando was also always ready to learn new things himself. — Second, his ability to set a technical vision for the team, design the system which solves the right problem and strikes a pragmatic balance between technical excellence and product roadmap. — And third, Rolando’s ability to lead the team in a way that makes it an enjoyable and safe environment for the engineers. I have really appreciated his leadership style(humble yet assertive when needed) which allowed the team to be a productive and fun place to work. I will always be happy to work together again!
Peter Popov (Engineering Manager — Autonomous Services)
Mr. Rolando Santamaría Masó, is a highly professional person, with a technical training and impressive productivity, entrepreneur, high teamwork skills, independence and ease in the interpretation and resolution of problems. He is a person, ethical, honest, modest, intelligent, good companion, he brings a lot of value to the teams in which he is linked. Personally, I do not just recommend it with all the guarantees
Rene LO (Chairman at Soltein sa de cv)

Conclusions

Good people usually reach the stars, I am lucky I have met Rolando in my career and personal life and for sure good friendships still exist nowadays.

With this article, I have proven that we have more than 10 reasons to rely on Rolando’s expertise to discuss important challenges that we may come up with. Rolando has been there supporting me and my Team at Codegenio in his spare time and I am very thankful for this.

Rolando lives in Berlin, Germany and I am looking forward to participating in events, conferences, in nearby IT events that may occur in the near future in the European area to stay energized and up to date.

Please follow Rolando on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyberneees/), and Twitter (https://twitter.com/kyberneees).

If you speak Spanish you will find his Podcast very interesting and rich in knowledge with the title, “Un ingeniero Informático en Berlin” see the link here https://anchor.fm/kyberneees